by John Farrow
Till calls his officers into a circle. “Leave everything as it was before we got here. I think we have the note memorized. Put it back in the pocket where we found it. Dennis, if you haven’t locked the BMW, lock it now. You can probably do that from inside, then put the fob back where we found it. I was never here for long. Do you understand? You had a look around, that’s the truth. I showed up, then relayed the information to our state troopers. That’s all true. I wasn’t here for long if anybody asks and I didn’t do a damn thing except call in the troopers and go home. Presumably to bed. When they arrive let them do their nose-around thing, see what they turn up. What we turned up, or less, or more, let them find that out on their own. If they miss something then we can help them along. Let them work it through first. Is all that clear enough? Sorry for the BS, guys, but we’ve got to play the game if we want involvement in this.”
They all get it, and the chief makes his call through to the state police. Cinq-Mars waits for him by the door, then they depart. Only they know where they’re headed, to the scene of the third murder of the day in the area. They are on their way across the river over the high bridge when they discover more about the victim they left behind. Cinq-Mars takes a call on his mobile, and at the end of it he’s silent a few moments, then he tells the chief, “Toomey. The dead guy. Worked for the State Department in name only.”
“What does that mean?” Till asks.
Cinq-Mars shrugs. “Probably means CIA. Or NSA. Like me, retired. He must’ve had clout to be handed a professorship on a platter.”
Till is driving down the long slope into White River Junction before he gets up the gumption to ask what he’s itching to know. “Émile, how the hell did you find that out so fast?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know this man well enough to explain it, although he’s impressed that he seems willing to accept that.
“Oh great,” Till fulminates, thinking it through. “We’ll be totally out of the picture if this goes up the ladder.”
“Hmm,” Cinq-Mars murmurs, as though to contradict him. He explains himself no further, and observes the characteristics of the town they’ve entered, which is clearly in a different economic bracket than Hanover, where they left. Night and day. Till lets him in on what he knows about the next victim, and Émile hunches forward as they approach a rather sad-looking house where on the second floor a woman is reported to have been both shot and hacked to death. Till issues a warning before they climb a short flight up.
“Take a good gulp of clean air, Émile,” he says. “This one’s not pretty, I’m told.”
Émile does take that deep breath, which is when he notices for the first time that the rain has finally ceased.
TWELVE
In the backstreet apartment in Vermont, where a fresh contingent of officers and a separate authority holds sway, they tread lightly. Chief Till puts on a happy face, although he’s informed right off the bat that his counterpart caved, putting in a call to the Vermont state troopers. Fortunately, available detectives are not nearby and the pair assigned to investigate have reported that they plan to finish their evening meal before driving to White River Junction. Twenty minutes earlier they announced their ETA as an hour and a half. Time enough for the local cops and their guests to poke around.
Knowing that he’s already fudging protocol, Chief Roy Horriza barely tolerates an introduction to Émile Cinq-Mars. The very temper of his handshake expresses a doubt concerning the wisdom of an outsider being on the scene, and he mumbles that he doesn’t endorse this development. His counterpart from across the river and the state line, Chief Till, explains, “Google the guy. He’s investigated more murders than we get in the North Country in a half century,” which is such an exaggeration that Émile Cinq-Mars wants to whip him. Till adds, “How many killings have you worked through yourself, Roy, where it wasn’t the boyfriend or the husband who did it? What fell out of the sky today is a complicated business. We can use this man’s expertise. Before you say what I know you’re going to say let me say something to the contrary.”
“What’s that?” Horriza is willing to listen. He has short red hair and a well-freckled neck. His eyes constantly dart around even when he’s as still as a brick.
“Fuck the idiot troopers,” Till postulates. “Your state and mine. In mine, I got shoved out the door with a broomstick up my rear. Told to go ticket jaywalkers. In effect. Do you think, Roy, you’ll fare better?”
The explanation suits neither Chief Horriza nor Émile. The ex-detective from Montreal is tempted to bring up that he’s only here because his niece is counting on him to intervene, that he’d rather be home with his fist around a nightcap, a thought that won’t go over well, either. Since he’s taken the trouble to be present, since no one is formally asking him to leave, and since a murdered and butchered woman is lying in front of him with her mouth agape, Émile merely grunts. He manages to do so with vague authority, and Horriza’s concerns are gently ignored.
He has a good look around.
Initially, he only glances at the poor victim, then seems to forget about her; the two chiefs clearly believe that a lengthy examination of the corpse is warranted. What do they expect him to do? Measure the gaping wounds created by a cleaver? Stick his eyeball into the bullet hole in the woman’s forehead? What is apparent here is apparent to all and he doesn’t need to provoke nightmares over the savagery. Instead, he peruses the kitchen, the bedroom, the closets, the bathroom.
Unknowingly, he’s agitating Chief Till, who feels that he’s having a gander in precisely the places where he didn’t bother to look in the previous house. When, eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him, the chief demands that Cinq-Mars explain himself.
“Toomey carefully controlled his environment,” postulates the former big-city detective. “Not the case here. What we wanted in the other house was the contents of his pockets, anything that he hadn’t disposed of yet or filed away. Chief Till, picture his wallet. Now ask yourself, how many men keep their billfold that neat and tidy, with nothing extraneous in it? One gas card, one credit card, no receipts, no notes jotted down along the way. Even a note buried in his pocket was meticulously folded into eighths. The only exception was a couple of receipts in his raincoat. Easy to forget the ones in there. Which reminds me, we have to get a look at his office on campus, preferably before the troopers show up ahead of us. This victim, on the other hand, does not tidy up as she goes. I’ve already seen condoms with their welcome DNA awaiting our analysis. Two toothbrushes, different colors. Who’s her lover? Working uniforms suitable for a cleaning lady hang behind the door in her bedroom and in her closet. Private or corporate? You might want to ask that question, but I have the answer. I’ve seen her pay stubs, both on her bureau and on the kitchen counter. As I said, she’s messy that way.”
“What’s her name?” Till asks.
“Malory Earle.”
“Who does she work for?”
“Dowbiggin School of International Studies.”
“Holy—”
“Exactly. You may want to consider this an isolated incident, Chief Horriza,” Émile says as the other man joins them and picks up his thread. “Go ahead. But the dots are beginning to connect. Not only do we have three murders in the same region on the same day, we could very well have three murders linked to the same institution.”
“A student and a professor, I see that,” Till mentions, “an easy link, but a cleaning lady?”
“Start by ruling it a threesome. If that doesn’t pan out, nothing’s lost. If you dismiss the connections off the bat you run the risk of wrecking the investigation before it’s begun.”
Neither chief needs to be convinced of that—and both resent being told—but Horriza spots a roadblock or two along the way. “What will happen when the New Hampshire and Vermont state troopers pool their resources? That’s a prescription not covered by Obamacare, let me tell you. They’ll mess it up.”
“Hmm,” Cinq-Mars notes, then helps
him out with that concern. “They may not get the chance.”
Horriza raises a quizzical eyebrow, and Till lets him know how things might change. “FBI. For better or worse.”
“Seriously?”
Till can’t explain it himself, and shrugs.
Cinq-Mars concludes his wanderings at the victim’s feet. The other two arrive behind him.
“What’s in her purse?” he asks.
He’s probably surprised that Horriza can quickly run down a list although he doesn’t let on. Hearing it all, he asks, “No keys?”
“Ah. Nope. Not in her purse.”
Having learned a thing or two from the previous house, Till suggests that they check what she wore during the day, and her outerwear. They do a thorough examination, but nothing shows up. All this time, Émile Cinq-Mars is standing by the body as if waiting for the corpse to sit up and have a chat. The two police chiefs report back to say that no keys have been found.
“They must be hidden somewhere,” Horriza maintains. “The place is a bit of a mess.”
“Who lets themselves into their own apartment,” Cinq-Mars wonders aloud, “then hides their keys? If they’re not here, what other keys does she carry with her? Keys for Dowbiggin, for instance? And yes, I want to know—you want to know—does she clean the clock tower?”
“The clock tower?” Horriza inquires. He hasn’t heard the details of the day’s first murder, and Till draws him a mental picture.
“Christ’s sake,” he sums up. “Doesn’t sound like these killings are connected from what you say. They’re different.”
“Way different,” Chief Till agrees.
“All the same in one way,” Cinq-Mars points out to them, and he smiles, knowing that he’s going to make them roll their eyes and groan. “In each case, someone’s dead.”
They don’t react exactly as he anticipated. Horriza flips the bird.
They seem to be waiting on their guest detective again, which only dawns on Cinq-Mars slowly. Drawing up a theory, he rocks his head to one side and back. “Whoever showed up, she wasn’t expecting him. I imagine that the door was left open, because she didn’t answer it. She was waiting, provocatively, I suspect, for a lover to make an appearance. That could have been who arrived, her lover, and he might’ve just stormed in and started hacking away. A pique of temper, always possible. Then he put one between her eyebrows for good measure. More likely, she didn’t know the intruder, and it was over before she could react. She would have been screaming from the first moment. This happened during the storm. Thunder and lightning, heavy rain. Why the brutality? We don’t know. Let’s keep it in mind as being a question that may lend an insight. Might be important. We’ll see. What do the neighbors say?”
Cinq-Mars is told that the victim was well liked, that she indeed worked as a cleaning lady, people weren’t sure where, a few said Dowbiggin, and that she worked shifts.
“What shift?”
“Nobody’s definitive about it. They say the midnight usually, but not always.”
“Interesting,” Cinq-Mars points out.
“How so?” Till asks.
“Explains the afternoon tryst. She’s not home at night to receive her lover.”
“You think he might be somebody slipping away.”
“We’re looking at a man with flexibility to his working hours. Assuming he worked days.”
“You mean like a professor. Like Toomey?”
“Or a cop.” He tacks on a quick grin. They know he’s needling them. “The professor and this one don’t match up to type. Not just black-white, but rich-poor, she’s taller I’d say, and don’t you think, Chief Till, having been in both their homes, that they seem culturally and socially at opposite ends of the spectrum?” Till feels obliged to concur. “Do you know where they do come together?” Émile asks them both.
Taking his question as a challenge, the policemen mull it through. Till notes that both victims, Toomey and the woman, are modestly overweight. Cinq-Mars agrees that that’s true, but says that that’s not it, although it’s a good observation. Neither the man nor the woman reside at the top end of universal beauty, Till points out, but adds that there’s no accounting for animal attraction. Cinq-Mars agrees with that as well, adding that intellectual attraction can’t be dismissed, either.
“How so?” Horriza objects. “She’s a cleaning lady. He’s a prof.”
“Have you checked out her library?”
Both men admit that that’s not occurred to them. For them, books fill shelf space, and that’s it.
“This lady reads,” Cinq-Mars informs them, “at a professorial level. What she does for a living doesn’t point to that. In any case, we don’t have to worry too much about it. Whoever her lover is, his DNA is all over this place. All we need to have to make things happen is to get that information back from the state troopers—from whichever state—once they acquire it.”
“My state,” Horriza says. “I’ll try to curry their favor. God knows, Till’s guys won’t be talking to him. He pisses everybody off.”
They have their little dig at each other, although there’s merit to what Horriza contends. A more amicable relationship with his troopers gives him an advantage over Till. At that moment one of his officers reports that he’s found a set of house keys in the kitchen. They’d been in plain view.
“No better place to hide something,” Cinq-Mars comments, and Horriza is mildly miffed. His crew has been formally chided by an old retired guy from Canada.
Cinq-Mars can see that he’s overstayed his welcome.
“Chief,” Cinq-Mars requests of Till, “what you said earlier is spot on. This isn’t pretty. Do you mind driving me home?”
The senior officer is surprised and a trifle taken aback, then decides that he’s happy to do so. This murder is not his investigation. He and Émile retreat and are on their way again.
THIRTEEN
On the way out of White River Junction, now that the rain has stopped, Émile Cinq-Mars and Chief Till have a clearer view of the storm’s destruction. Hoses run from basement windows to the streets, pumping excess water. Gusts have lopped off big limbs and taken down trees and in the glow of streetlights low-lying lawns sparkle as ponds. Crews tend to power outages. Neither man can see the Connecticut River while traversing the highway bridge, yet both imagine it, that roaring, that spontaneous surge through the dark. Toppled trees spin and nosedive in the frantic rapids, while overhead a pale moon peeks through the scud of clouds surfing a tailwind.
Not knowing the area well, Émile expects they’ll take the ramp off the far end of the bridge into West Lebanon, New Hampshire, retracing the way they ventured out. Till carries on toward Lebanon proper instead to depart the highway there. The visitor notes again that the man is obedient to the rules of the road, as he keeps the speedometer bang on the legal limit, at sixty-five.
“What do you make of it, Émile?” Till ruminates. “We have our troubles now and again, even though Holyoake’s a real quiet community. Hanover, too, for the most part. Everybody has problems, we have our own in a sporadic fashion, nothing you don’t expect. Although we arrest more students than anywhere across the Ivy League. For us though, make no mistake, three murders in a single day puts us on the map as a war zone. Like we’ve been invaded by an occupying force.”
“Or by aliens,” Émile reflects, as though he’s serious. “So we want to believe. Sorry, Chief, for your troubles, but people are wicked everywhere. I take your meaning. Visiting my wife’s folks over the years, I’ve enjoyed the peace and quiet of the place.”
“There you go.”
“Which is why it makes more sense if I ask you the question you’re asking me. What do you make of all this? You’re the man with the heap of local knowledge.”
“Beats the hell out of me. Can’t make hide nor tail of it.”
“Hmm,” Cinq-Mars murmurs, dissatisfied with that response. Momentarily, he says, “Put it another way. What troubles have you had lately? Anything recu
rring, ongoing?”
The question carries Till into a different mood. One he’d rather not visit. “Campuses in the region have had rape issues. True for a lot of the country; we were singled out for extra publicity. A climate of fear took hold. That mess is in the past, we’re telling people. We hope we’re right. Measures were taken, we had demonstrations and the like which at first I didn’t welcome. Not only were college administrations for at least three schools on the hook. Folks also condemned the police in general, and me in particular. We’re seeing the value now, though. Young people coming out in public like that, the culture may have altered. I don’t think you can change a rapist’s sick mind, but you can make the perpetrators more fearful, less bold. Boys who fall out of line can put a check on themselves. All that helps.”
“I suspect that’s true, if only to a degree,” Émile concurs.
“We’re also hoping,” Till goes on, “that whoever was responsible, however many individuals were involved, that they’re graduating. Don’t get me wrong. Sending them to prison is my preference, but if they’re putting on a square-cornered cap and getting the hell out of here, then good riddance, I say. Be gone.”
“They become someone else’s problem,” Cinq-Mars reminds him.
“Did I not mention that I preferred prison? My failure to bring the culprits to justice weighs pretty damn heavy. Might yet cost me my job, too, I dunno yet, though that’s not the point. If our young women are safer because the son of a tycoon’s gone home to sit around his country club in Georgia or be another dickhead on Wall Street or wherever the hell he goes, I’ll take that for now.”
“Not true today,” Cinq-Mars points out, with a note of solemnity.
Till is quiet at first. “No, not true today,” he admits. “This is my problem now.”
“Unless,” Émile speculates. A thought has occurred which he nurtures internally.